Peder felt sick to his stomach. He nodded, admitting those were the bombs he had made for the pirates and stored on board the ship before he killed Samatar and escaped.
“Tell me about the bombs,” Special Agent Wheelhouse said, pushing the edge of the table into Peder’s chest to get his full attention. “Spit it out,” she shouted. “You two are not the only bomb experts in this room. What do you think I studied for my master’s degree after 9/11? What did the FBI teach me at Quantico after that?”
Diane Wheelhouse adjusted the focus of her high-tech sunglasses, capturing all sorts of biometric data from Peder’s reactions: facial contortions, body movements, thermal reactions, the tics, tells, and much more, relaying the data stream to the observation room next door.
In the observation room, the intel agents and officers were impressed with how FBI Special Agent Wheelhouse steered the interrogation, drawing out all kinds of biometric data and emotional response so the analysts in the room and back in Langley and Quantico could use it to dive deep into the psyche of the Norwegian sniper. They needed her to turn Olsen over to become an informant.
“I thought the director told her to go easy,” an FBI counterterrorist expert said.
In the interrogation room, Diane Wheelhouse hammered away at the facade, at the manhood of Peder Olsen. “What’s the makeup of the plastic explosives you used?”
“Let’s see…” He sighed. “The accelerator blasting cap tubes were—”
“Not the trigger, the material. Tell me,” she said, glancing down at the tablet.
“C’mon, Peder, what did you use?” Merk asked, leaning across the table.
“Ja, ja. They probably found it,” he said, exasperated. “Uh, it was Semtex-H…”
“From where?” Wheelhouse pressed, raising her voice again.
“Libya. Err, the same kind of plastique used in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.”
“What else went into the brick?” Merk prodded.
“A few chemicals that introduce more internal oxygen to speed up the expansion of the blast, you know… titanium microfibers to guarantee flashpoint,” he said, looking lost.
“Well, we know it’s not slow-acting fertilizer or one of Assad’s chlorine barrel bombs, don’t we. How many more of these bombs did you make?” she asked, texting a message to the agents next door in the observation room.
“What do you mean, more bombs?”
“Where are you storing the rest of the material? Who was your goddamn supplier? People are going to die,” Wheelhouse yelled. The special agent stood up and stabbed her finger into Peder’s flaking, sunburnt forehead. “Wake up, troll, or you might find yourself dead.”
“Umm… Agent Wheelhouse, you want to lighten up a little,” Merk said.
“Hell no. Get in line, sailor,” she said. She shook her head at Peder and clicked the final image of a digital map of Olsen’s black market network. “Hey, Viking Virus, you recognize any of the names in your network tree on the screen?”
Peder looked at the Venn diagram connecting him to clouds of terrorist organizations in Libya Dawn with the bomb-makers, warlord brothers in the Somali Pirates, Yemeni al Qaeda, and the Syrian Electronic Army. Diane pressed the remote adding a top-level cloud, showing new links down to the middleware of pirates, ISIS, and al Qaeda affiliates backed by an image of Syrian General Adad, Iranian nuclear scientists, and North Korean missile engineers.
“Svarte Occulte,” Peder mouthed, shocked by what he saw.
“Olsen, you are a pawn in all this, just a minnow. You know that?” she said. “A lot of people are going to die in the next couple of weeks, unless we intercept them, disrupt their plans, roll up their terrorist network. Do you understand? If it happens, you will die. I’ll see to it.”
Peder nodded ja.
“Korfa has gone missing. He or someone in his inner circle will carry out the attack in the US. The FBI needs to drill down into his network. Are you going to help? Or should the Bureau send you back to Norway in a body bag?” she asked.
His eyes watered; he took a breath. “There’s an American I’ve been chatting with…”
“Really? Who was it?”
“I don’t know his name. No emails… never any emails or texts. Phone calls only made from the shipowner’s office. Er, he had a Russian accent,” he said.
“Do you have his number?”
He shook his head. “It changed every week. He always called from a new burner phone.”
Diane turned around and looked up at a hidden camera in a light fixture, saying, “Do you hear that? Check all of Peder’s phone records — after work hours — the loading dock, and go back to the Blå Himmel crew who were just released. Confirm Olsen’s story.”
She waved for Merk to leave the room. When he stepped out and closed the door, she took a picture of Peder with the tablet, informing him, “You cooperate, and you might end up in a cozy prison in Norway. You screw me, I’ll make sure you spend the rest of your life in a shit hole prison in Yemen.”
Chapter Sixty-Five
In the observation room, Diane Wheelhouse handed over the high-tech glasses to the CIA station chief of Kaiserslautern — “K-Town” — where Ramstein AFB was situated in southwest Germany. The agent told him that she needed to go over some notes with the navy dolphin trainer, to grab some R&R, and then pick up the intel discussion in the morning.
“Great job, Special Agent Wheelhouse.” The FBI counterterrorist expert congratulated her for extracting a ton of information from the Norwegian sniper in a short amount of time.
“It’s Agent Roundhouse to you,” she said amid laughter of the other agents.
Overhearing her words with the station chief, the ONI attaché informed Merk, “Go debrief with her. But don’t leave the base. You and I will have dinner late.”
“Roger that,” Merk said, eyeing the medals on the attaché’s white uniform; there was no Purple Heart or medal for bravery.
Outside, Special Agent Wheelhouse flashed her FBI credentials to an FBI driver of one of the SUVs, slipped him 100 euros, and told him she needed the vehicle for a few hours, after arriving jetlagged from Los Angeles. She opened the backseat door for Merk, who stepped in and closed it. Wheelhouse climbed into the driver’s seat, clicked the seat belt lock, and drove down the winding base road to the main gate.
Special Agent Diane Wheelhouse looked at Merk in the rearview mirror, and slowly pulled off a red-auburn wig. She unfurled her long jet-black hair, hand-combing the silk strands down her shoulders. She took off the sunglasses and eyed Merk in the mirror again, this time radiating warmth with her black eyes. Jenny King smiled broadly for the first time in months.
“Jesus, Jenny, you were good in there,” Merk said.
“Is that all you have to say, in what… almost a year?” Jenny asked.
“My god, great to see you. What’s up with your pasty white skin?” he said.
“I played Ms. North Korea,” she replied, and cooed in a sexy voice — “So Merk, what should we do in Ramstein? Go bowling? Stay at the base inn? Drink beer with the ensigns?”
“Well, I–I-I—”
“Well, I reserved a suite at a luxury hotel in Kaiser-whatever.”
“Kaiserslautern,” Merk said, completing the Germanic name. “You do know it’s called K-Town by the troops here. My father loved the place. It was a party town back in his day.”
“The only K-Towns I know are Koreatowns. And they’re located in New York, DC, LA, and Seoul.” She pulled up to the gate guardhouse, powered down the window, and asked the MP who approached the vehicle, “I just landed from Camp Lemonnier in North Africa. Do you know any good restaurants nearby?”